UTC Website Projects

and CMS migration

Closeout

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In project management, the final phase of a project is called closure. It’s a bit like the old adage that a job is not over until the paperwork is done. The closure phase usually involves wrapping up loose ends, paying final invoices, and releasing resources to go onto other projects and priorities.

In my case, closure means a little more. As some of you may know, I’ll be leaving UTC at the end of July to move on. I’m excited for the challenge ahead as CIO at Lenoir-Rhyne, a small private university in North Carolina. But as a project manager and member of the UTC community, I will miss the camaraderie I’ve experienced with so many in the UTC family.

I would be derelict in my duties if I did not provide a few thank yous and recognitions as I close out my web projects tenure…

Thanks to George Heddleston for trusting me. Thank you for believing that it all can be done at the same time as everything else and for allowing me the breadth and depth to make it so. And thank you, too, for letting me nurture my inner blogger.

Thanks to Dennis Gendron for telling George, “I have someone who might be able to help with project management.”

Thanks to the web student workers: Josh, Christina, Allyson, Jamesen, Aaren, Kishan, Lauren, Lauren, Nicholas, and Luke. You are the best. What an education you have received and will continue to get as part of this team. It’s not just a job, it’s an adventure with stories and jokes to tell along the way.

Thanks to Gina Stafford and Stephen Rumbaugh for all the laughs, the shared interests, and for all you do to keep the UTC community informed, engaged, and de-treed. And to Sarah Joyner, may the Oxford comma live on in our hearts and minds. We simply could not have accomplished the website refresh or my weekly blog posts without you!

Thanks to the interactive map implementation team of Donny Behneman, Holley Beeland, Faith Garner, Eric Williams, David Siedel, Jason Lyon, Steve Rumbaugh, and Chris Gilligan. Of the dozens of projects I’ve managed over the years, this, without a doubt, tops the list. What an incredible gift we are delivering to the campus when the map goes live on Monday.

Finally, thanks to the web team of Chris Gilligan, Michael Flores, and Bernardo Martinez. Through website refresh and half a migration, you’ve made me laugh, cry, drink, and learn a whole new language that is web development. It has been a joy and privilege to work with you, hire some of you, and slave away beside you these last two years. I will miss GIF Fridays, food talks, and the dozens of simultaneous Teams conversations that fill our days.

I now pass the torch to Megan Shadrick. My hope is that you find the thrill of the chase exhilarating and are able to stand your ground against whatever might be thrown at you 😊. It’s worth every minute.

So, thanks for the memories my friends.

A Mapping We Will Go

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Heigh ho the derry-o. For all those home schooling or entertaining children and grandchildren with nursery rhymes at this time, familiar terrain can be a comfort. While we may not be out and about, we may still long to traverse our beautiful UTC campus. With that in mind, let me tell you a story.

Once upon a time, a gentleman named George, met with his friend, Dr. Angle, and they wanted a way for visitors, friends, students, parents, and everyone they knew to be able to find their way around the campus. They knew their way around, but they know others don’t.

George asked his friend, Chèrie, to see if there was a better way to help visitors to UTC experience the campus virtually. Whether the visitor would physically come to campus or just want to look around, an ‘interactive’ map could be just the thing.

Chèrie set about meeting with people called ‘vendors’ and invited those vendors to campus late last fall. Several of Chèrie’s friends attended the meetings and made suggestions on what an interactive map could do for them. Chèrie and friend, Chris Gilligan, also talked to friends in Knoxville to find out if they were happy with their vendor choice.

In January, everyone agreed that one of the vendors would do a fine job helping map our campus and the ground was laid to buy their software and services.

In early March, a team came together representing Facilities, Safety, Academic Affairs, Information Technology, Communications and Marketing, Undergraduate Admissions, Auxiliary Services and the SimCenter to plan and plot the path to this new interactive map.

Fast forward to Thursday, April 23, the whole gang gathered virtually for the first training session on how to build and maintain our new maps created by the vendor, Concept3d. As a result of the training, the Interactive Map implementation team has homework to complete, just like our children and grandchildren. We will be identifying buildings, and streets, and trees, and fields, and parking and all manner of lovely places on our campus.

We’ll also make sure we think about accessibility so all visitors feel welcomed. Eventually, hopefully by the end of July, we will have a map with all our special places identified and where the Mocs can roam from dorms to the University Center to classrooms far and wide without ever leaving home. Visitors will learn about our buildings and how to find us when they actually can come to visit our campus.

Now where are the directions to the yellow brick road? The End.

 

But Where Is ‘There?’

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I used to console one of my teams by saying “Don’t worry, we’ll get there.” It seemed like a cliché statement but usually conveyed the upbeat optimism often needed by a project manager. While I recognized there were obstacles and challenges, it always seemed like a natural way to keep up everyone’s spirits in the face of tasks that continued to pile on.

Until one day after saying this phrase, one of my team members said, “But where is ‘there?’” He was a bit of a philosopher, so we all had a good laugh at the existential question.

Getting there is the goal. Getting there can also be the journey. Getting all the website content migrated is a “there” in my mind. With over 6,000 webpages, “there” can seem like a distant star.

Getting “there” one page at a time. [Read more…]

Building a Website One Block at a Time

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Santa was very good to me.  I received the Guggenheim Museum and the Women of NASA LEGO sets. So many little tiny pieces! However, the journey to completion will provide the most fun and probably some frustration.

Construction takes planning. The Women of NASA set has 231 pieces and the Guggenheim has 744 pieces and a 40-page guide! The first task is to sort the pieces by color and then by shape. Everything from that point starts with assembling the base and working my way up.

[Read more…]

And That’s a Wrap

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It finally happened. The website refresh, Phase 1 of a multi-year deep look into the UTC website, has officially closed out as a project. The refresh began in October 2018.

We chose a ‘refresh’ over ‘redesign’ as we wanted to address the following goals:

  • Accessibility of the entire site.
  • Elimination of old, outdated content and pages (also to reduce page count).
  • Responsive design regardless of audience viewing on a smartphone, tablet or computer.
  • Establish more consistency across the entire site to improve user experience.
  • Focus attention on the external audiences of the site, specifically attracting and retaining students.

[Read more…]

The Shortest Pencil Beats the Longest Memory

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My husband is a woodworker. He reads, plans, makes notes, makes more notes, draws pictures, creates mock-ups from cardboard, practices his ideas on leftovers, figures out the cost of materials, scouts various hardware stores, and eventually he starts the actual building of a project. I frequently tell him he has all the hallmarks of a great project manager, although his projects seldom complete on the schedule I provide!

So this weekend, in his new issue of Fine Homebuilding magazine, he points out an article on “Trading in your hammer for a clipboard.” My personal and professional life collided.

I don’t have a good analogy for the hammer, but I can say that many of those tasks listed above have happened in various forms to bring the Web Refresh project team to this point.

[Read more…]

Infrastructure of UTC’s Drupal 8 Project

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Building and maintaining a content management system for a high-traffic, public website is very challenging. Developers need to have a rational, safe and well-documented system for getting code from their local computer, into a testing environment, and then deployed to a production web server. For the UTC CMS Migration project, we have chosen a system built with technology supplied by Acquia, a software-as-a-service company that provides enterprise products, services, and technical support for the open-source web content management platform Drupal.

[Read more…]

And Then There Were 10

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Do you remember that feeling you had when you were on your way to your first day of school? A mix of excitement, anticipation, maybe a little fear and trepidation for the work that is to come? First days can be filled equally with mixed emotions for new employees.

Well, on the web team we have grown exponentially in the last year. First, Mike Flores joined Chris Gilligan in January and they have anchored our development work this year. And, on August 15, we increased the development team by one third. Bernardo Martinez is our newest web programmer and now part of the UTC web triumvirate.

[Read more…]

Sprinting to Go Live

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The finish line has been set for months.

The crowd grows anxious as the race date nears.

The race organizers wait with anticipation as the coach assures them everything is moving ahead as planned.

The racers have trained, trained and trained some more. They’ve met hurdles that seemed far too high. But through perseverance and dedication, they are nearing the starting line.

[Read more…]

The Fine Art of Following Up

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Nobody likes to be nagged. Whether it comes from your mom, your spouse, or your boss, it may have more to say about the nagger than the naggie.

To be a good project manager, one must find ways of following up that yield results over resentment. As I’ve discussed in previous blogs, a role of a project manager is to make sure a project completes on time, at or under budget and within scope. I also like to add a fourth element and that’s to maintain a positive, productive working relationship with all the stakeholders on a project. I’m happy if no one dies or is incarcerated as a result of a project I’ve managed!

Projects can easily get off track. Especially during summer, project participants go on vacation, take days off for holidays or generally are away from the office. Yet the project remains. So it is with our Website Refresh project.

[Read more…]